if you condensed every Metalhead’s efforts at creating the most unnerving dirge the Universe has ever heard, they probably couldn’t outdo the efforts of the unknown musicians who conjured-up today’s Song Poem. While we know its lyrics were penned by a Sgt Kenneth E. Green, this composition, discombobulating warped-vinyl or not, likely out-ugly’s anything he ever witnessed on the battlefield. Behold… – See more at: http://joup.co/the-sunday-song-poem-8-the-man-called-jesus/#sthash.cD9Tw8M9.dpuf

Good evening. I’m Michael Stipe and I’m here to induct Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

When an artist offers an idea, a perspective, it helps us all to see who we are. And it wakes up, and it pushes us forward towards our collective and individual potential. It makes us—each of us—able to see who we are more clearly. It’s progression and progressive movement. It’s the future staring us down in the present and saying, “C’mon, let’s get on with it. Here we are. Now.”

I embrace the use of the word “artist” rather than “musician” because the band Nirvana were artists in every sense of the word. It is the highest calling for an artist, as well as the greatest possible privilege to capture a moment, to find the zeitgeist, to expose our struggles, our aspirations, our desires. To embrace and define a period of time. That is my definition of an artist.

Nirvana captured lightning in a bottle. And now, per the dictionary—off the Internet—in defining “lightning in a bottle” as, “Capturing something powerful and elusive, and then being able to hold it and show it to the world.”

Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl were Nirvana. The legacy and the power of their defining moment has become, for us, indelible. Like my band, R.E.M., Nirvana came from a most unlikely place. Not a cultural city-center like London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or even New York—or Brooklyn—but from Aberdeen, Washington in the Pacific Northwest, a largely blue-collar town just outside of Seattle.

Krist Novoselic said Nirvana came out of the American hardcore scene of the 1980’s—this was a true underground. It was punk rock, where the many bands or musical styles were eclectic. We were a product of a community of youth looking for a connection away from the mainstream. The community built structures outside of the corporate, governmental sphere, independent, and decentralized. Media connected through the copy machine, a decade before the Internet, as we know it, came to be. This was social networking with a face.

Solo artists almost have it easier than bands—bands are not easy. You find yourself in a group of people who rub each other the wrong way, and exactly the right way. And you have chemistry, zeitgeist, lightning in a bottle and a collective voice to help pinpoint a moment, to help understand what it is that we’re going through. You see this is about community and pushing ourselves. Nirvana tapped into a voice that was yearning to be heard.

Keep in mind the times: this was the late 80’s, early 90’s. America, the idea of a hopeful, democratic country, had been practically dismantled by Iran-Contra, by AIDS, by the Reagan/Bush Sr. administrations.

But with their music, their attitude, their voice, by acknowledging the political machinations of petty, but broad-reaching, political arguments, movements and positions that had held us culturally back, Nirvana blasted through all that with crystalline, nuclear rage and fury. Nirvana were kicking against the system, bringing complete disdain for the music industry, and their definition of corporate, mainstream America, to show a sweet and beautiful—but fed-up—fury, coupled with howling vulnerability.

Lyrically exposing our frailty, our frustrations, our shortcomings. Singing of retreat and acceptance over triumphs of an outsider community with such immense possibility, stymied or ignored, but not held down or held back by the stupidity and political pettiness of the times. They spoke truth, and a lot of people listened.

They picked up the mantle in that particular battle, but they were singular, and loud, and melodic, and deeply original. And that voice. That voice. Kurt, we miss you. I miss you.

Nirvana defined a moment, a movement for outsiders: for the fags, for the fat girls, for the broken toys, the shy nerds, the Goth kids from Tennessee and Kentucky, for the rockers and the awkward, for the fed-up, the too-smart kids and the bullied. We were a community, a generation—in Nirvana’s case, several generations—in the echo chamber of that collective howl, and Allen Ginsberg would have been very proud, here.

That moment and that voice reverberated into music and film, politics, a worldview, poetry, fashion, art, spiritualism, the beginning of the Internet, and so many fields in so many ways in our lives. This is not just pop music—this is something much greater than that.

These are a few artists who rub each other the wrong way, and exactly the right way, at the right time: Nirvana.

According to the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’, a 1484 tome on Witchcraft, the ‘Midwife’ was the most dangerous sub-category of harridan, insinuating itself into the confidence of a burgeoning family and wreaking unspeakable havoc on the fruit of their loins before, during and immediately after delivery. Sure as a mucus plug something had to give, and that’s when man stepped in. After much experimentation into their hounding, torture, buoyancy and flammability yielded the groundbreaking discovery that witches didn’t exist, it was deducted that the pestilence of their machinations could be attributed instead to the devilishness and ineptitude inherent in women in general…

The red curtains of my bedroom do just enough to shield the dying summer sundown from the screen of my portable TV. There’s nary a hair on my balls and a Teenage Mutant ‘Hero’ Turtle poster beams at me from each of four walls. It’s entirely likely I’m wearing white High-Tops and a T-Shirt depicting Bart Simpson ‘hanging ten’ upside down in a “tube”. Through a blizzard of static I stop tuning as I suddenly discover a man in a beige trench coat stepping delicately through a pitch black forest, before being caught in a spotlight with no logical point of origin and confronted by the impossible manifestation of softly swaying red drapes among the sinisterly lilting boughs. He approaches the curtains cautiously, then quickly, inquisitively slips between them whereupon they both vanish completely, leaving only the heavily populated desolation of those introductory dark woods.

‘Gretchen’s New Dish’ is no opus, but like any great work of art, demands of you an engagement, a participation, there is within contained a world to be discovered beyond Dick Kent’s frenzied attempts to dab in the backdrop with his theatrical channeling of a benevolent Bavarian. When first I heard ‘Gretchen’s New Dish’, I was transfixed. When it ended, I put it on again. Sometimes, I would listen to it multiple times. I’d play it for friends, hunched up and grinning, arms squeezed tightly to my sides, index fingers playing air piano. They’d look at me like I’d just masturbated on their wedding cake.

Jim Muir’s ‘The Moon Men’, whether intentional or not, is an undertaking as epic and perilous as the Apollo 11 mission that it chronicles. Muir launches with bravado, realises he’s bitten off more than he can chew, but has to hold on tight for dear life on this one way ticket ride to oblivion. All good Song Poems are measured on it’s performer’s ability to swagger and to a certain degree ‘sell’ the ramblings of the anonymous song poet, here Jim Muir gets cocky, and beats his waxen wings too close to the sun. – See more at: http://joup.co/the-sunday-song-poem-5-john-muit-the-moon-men/#sthash.pQUjVhHQ.dpuf

So I’m watching the Oscars Sunday night… Nah, I’m not. For one, I live in England, so I’d have to stay up until midnight just to see what ridiculously price-tagged fabric some people who ‘play pretend’ for a living decided to adorn their gorgeous torso-with before dawdling on a red pile tongue. Secondly, no one starts winning anything significant until 2am GMT, then it’s about 4 before I get to see the people I think are moderately deserving of an anthropomorphic golden dildo get overlooked… – See more at: http://joup.co/your-fucked-up-childhood-mark-twai/#sthash.ql2OV4xx.dpuf